You are here

Faculty

is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology with joint affiliations in the Woodrow Wilson School and the Office of Population Research. Her research interests include public health, the history and sociology of medicine, risk in obstetrics, and medical ethics. She is currently conducting research on diseases and agenda-setting, and on fetal personhood and the evolution of obstetrical practice and ethics. She is the author or coauthor of articles in Health Affairs, Social Science and Medicine, Journal of Marriage and the Family, International Family Planning Perspectives, and Studies in Family Planning and is the author of Conceiving Risk, Bearing Responsibility: Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and the Diagnosis of Moral Disorder (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). She was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy Research at the University of Michigan from 1998-2000. Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania.

is the Musgrave Professor of Sociology and Professor of Sociology and International Affairs in the WWS. He was the founding Director of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (2003-2007) and Master of Wilson College (1997-2004). In 2000, he founded the Princeton University Preparatory Program. He is interested in political sociology and social change. He has published many books and articles most recently State and Nation Making in Latin America and Spain (CUP 2013) and the “Arc of Neo-liberalism” (Annual Review of Sociology 2012). Forthcoming books include War and Society and Building States in the Developing World. New projects include an analysis of “emergent risk” in global flows and a history of the concept of discipline.

is the Henry Putnam University Professor in Sociology and a faculty affiliate at the Office of Population Research and the Center for Health and Wellbeing. He earned his PhD in sociology from Columbia University in 1996 and a PhD in Biology (Genomics) from NYU in 2014. His research focuses on how socio-economic status and health are transmitted across generations and on the public policies that affect those processes. He studies sibling differences in socioeconomic success; racial inequalities; the measurement of class; and how health and biology affect (and are affected by) social position. His publications include Being Black, Living in the Red; The Starting Gate; Honky; The Pecking Order; You May Ask Yourself; and Parentology. He is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and has been the recipient of Guggenheim, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Russell Sage Foundation fellowships as well as a CAREER award and the Alan T. Waterman Award of the National Science Foundation. (See Open Scholar Profile)

is Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology and author of Slim’s Table (Chicago), Sidewalk (FSG), Ghetto, and Introduction to Sociology (with Giddens et. al., Ninth Edition, 2012). His ethnographic film, Sidewalk (with Barry Alexander Brown. 2010) begins where the book ended and updates his stories of the vendors on Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village. [It is available at no charge by contacting cnanfra@princeton.edu.] A graduate of the University of Chicago, he works in the traditions of urban ethnography that began there in the 1920s. Recent graduate seminars include “Ethnography and Public Policy,” “The Chicago School,” and “Ethnographic Methods.” Undergraduate courses include “Introduction to Sociology,” “The Ghetto,” and “Sociology from E-Street: Bruce Springsteen’s America.”

holds a joint position as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and as a Research Associate in the Office of Population Research. Her field of interest is international development with an emphasis on immigration, race, ethnicity, and gender. She is the author of For We Are Sold, I and My People: Women and Industry in Mexico's Frontier, listed as a favorite title by Contemporary Sociology, a book which has never gone out of print since 1983 when it was first published. With filmmaker Lorraine Gray, she produced the Emmy-Award winning documentary "The Global Assembly Line," which focuses on the effects of economic globalization on working women and their families in the Philippines, Mexico, and the U.S. Her latest book (edited with Jon Shefner, University of Tennessee) is Out of the Shadows: Political Action and Informal Economy in Latin America (Penn State University Press 2006). Her current law-related work includes two projects: (a) in collaboration with the Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund (LALDEF) research among Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants towards the creation of a legal advocacy clinic; and (b) in collaboration with Hispanic Americans for Progress (HAP), a not-for-profit organization created and maintained by long-term inmates at the New Jersey State Prison, research and advocacy focusing on the American prison system.

is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and a Faculty Associate of the Office of Population Research. Her research connects cultural understandings and behavioral outcomes during the transition to adulthood in sub-Saharan Africa. She employs a variety of data sources and methodological approaches, including in-depth interviews, classroom observations, computational text analysis, and sequence analysis. Her research has been published in the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, and Population and Development Review. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and Demography from the University of California, Berkeley, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard for two years before joining the faculty at Princeton.

joins the faculty this fall as an Assistant Professor jointly appointed in the Department of Sociology and the Woodrow Wilson School of International and Public Affairs. He earned his PhD in Sociology from the University of California at Berkeley and was a Robert Wood Johnson Post-Doctoral Scholar at Harvard. His areas of interest include economic sociology, organizations, and social stratification. His current research examines the social consequences of financial capitalism in the contemporary United States. He is interested in how institutional changes associated with ‘financialization’ have reshaped various socio-economic domains, and how organizations, communities and households respond to these changes in patterned (and often surprising) ways. His research has been published in the American Sociological Review, Socio-Economic Review, and The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Finance.

is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and a Faculty Associate of the Office of Population Research. His research interests are in the field of demography, with an emphasis on immigration and health. His current research evaluates the relative importance of culture and selective migration in explaining differential patterns of stratification between U.S.-born and foreign-born individuals in the United States. Hamilton also explores the degree of health selection among contemporary immigrants to the United States as well as the role that social, economic, and health conditions in immigrants’ countries of origin play in explaining variation in their post-migration health in the United States.

is Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, with a joint appointment in the Woodrow Wilson School. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society, he is the current president of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and is a member of the Council of the National Academy of Sciences and co-editor of the Annual Review of Sociology. He currently serves as Director of the Office of Population Research. Massey’s research focuses on international migration, race and housing, discrimination, education, urban poverty, stratification, and Latin America, especially Mexico. He is the author, most recently, of Brokered Boundaries: Constructing Immigrant Identity in Anti-Immigrant Times, coauthored with Magaly Sanchez and Published by the Russell Sage Foundation.

is the William S. Tod Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University. She is the founding director of the Bendheim-Thoman Center for Research on Child Wellbeing (CRCW) and the interim director of the Education Research Section (ERS). She is a principal investigator of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study and Editor-in-Chief of The Future of Children, a journal dedicated to providing research and analysis to promote effective policies and programs for children. She is the author of over 180 articles and 7 books including Children of the Great Recession (2016) Fathers Under Fire: The Revolution in Child Support Enforcement (1998); Social Policies for Children (1996); Growing Up with a Single Parent (1994); Child Support and Child Wellbeing (1994);Child Support Assurance: Design Issues, Expected Impacts, and Political Barriers, as Seen from Wisconsin (1992); and Single Mothers and Their Children: A New American Dilemma (1986). She received the Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Sociological Association Family Section in 2004.

is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and a Faculty Associate of the Office of Population Research. He earned his PhD in Sociology from the University of California at Berkeley; and he taught at the University of Chicago before relocating to Princeton in Fall 2016. His research interests include: ethnoracial categorization and stratification; political sociology; health, theory; the sociology of the body; social psychology and cognition; and Brazil. Additionally, he is interested in Geometric Data Analysis (otherwise referred to as Multiple Correspondence Analysis). His research has been published or is forthcoming in the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, and Social Problems.

is a Professor in the Department of Sociology. His interests include social networks and computational social science. One main area of his research has focused on developing network-based statistical methods for studying populations most at risk for HIV/AIDS. A second main area of work has been using the World Wide Web to collect and analyze social data in innovative ways. He is the author of Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age, and his research has been published in journals such as Science, Sociological Methodology, and Journal of the American Statistical Association. His papers have won the Outstanding Article Award from the Mathematical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association and the Outstanding Statistical Application Award from the American Statistical Association, and he received the Leo Goodman Award from the Methodology Section of the American Sociological Association. Popular accounts of his work have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist, and New Yorker. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Joint United Nations Program for HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), Sloan Foundation, Facebook, and Google.

is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and the University Center for Human Values as well as Director of the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University. She joined the Princeton faculty in 2005 after nearly a decade on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, where she was the John J. O'Brien Professor of Comparative Law. Scheppele's work focuses on the intersection of constitutional and international law, particularly in constitutional systems under stress. After 1989, Scheppele studied the emergence of constitutional law in Hungary and Russia, living in both places for extended periods. After 9/11, Scheppele researched the effects of the international "war on terror" on constitutional protections around the world. Her many publications on both post-1989 constitutional transitions and on post-9/11 constitutional challenges have appeared in law reviews, social science journals and multiple languages. In the last two years, she has been a public commentator on the transformation of Hungary from a constitutional-democratic state to one that risks breaching constitutional principles of the European Union.

is Stuart Professor of Communications and Public Affairs and Professor of Sociology, with a joint appointment in the Woodrow Wilson School. His interests include institutional analysis, political sociology, sociology of the media, and the sociology of knowledge, technology, and information, especially as they bear on questions of democracy, equality, and freedom. These interests are reflected in his teaching as well as his research. Professor Starr has written three books about health care institutions and policies: The Social Transformation of American Medicine(1983), which won the Bancroft Prize (American History), C. Wright Mills Award (Sociology), and Pulitzer Prize (General Nonfiction); The Logic of Health Care Reform (1992); and Remedy and Reaction: The Peculiar American Struggle over Health-Care Reform (2011, revised ed. 2013). He is also the author of The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (2004), as well as numerous articles about contemporary changes in media and the public sphere. At Princeton, he holds the Stuart Chair in Communications at the Wilson School, serves on the American Studies committee and the Program in Law and Public Affairs, and chairs the University Resources Committee. Outside the university, he writes extensively on public issues for a non-academic audience. In 1990, with Robert Kuttner and Robert Reich, he co-founded The American Prospect, a liberal magazine. During 1993 he served as a senior health policy advisor at the White House. His bookFreedom's Power (2007) provides an account of both the philosophical and institutional development of liberalism from its classical to modern phases. He is currently working on a project on the entrenchment of power, law, and social structure, as well as a book about unanticipated changes in the development of post-industrial societies.

is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and is also affiliated with the Department of Politics and the Office of Population Research. He develops new quantitative statistical methods for applications across the social sciences. Methodologically his focus is in tools which facilitate automated text analysis and model complex heterogeneity in regression. Many recent applications of these methods have centered on using large corpora of text to better understand propaganda in contemporary China. His research has been published in journals such as American Journal of Political Science, Political Analysis and the Proceedings of the Association of Computational Linguistics. His work has won the Edward R Chase Dissertation Prize, the Gosnell Prize for Excellence in Political Methodology, and the Political Analysis Editor’s Choice Award.

is Maurice P. During '22 Professor in Demographic Studies, Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, with joint affiliations in the Office of Population Research and the Woodrow Wilson School. From 1997 to2002, she served as director of the Office of Population Research. She is co-author and co-editor of several books, including of The Hispanic Population of the United States (1987), Divided Opportunities (1988), The Color of Opportunity (2001), Youth in Cities (2002), Ethnicity and Causal Mechanisms (2005),Multiple Origins, Uncertain Destinies (2006), Hispanics and the Future of America (2006), and Africa on the Move (2006). She has published over 150 scholarly papers in academic journals and edited collections, in addition to numerous research bulletins and articles for a lay audience. She holds a BA in Spanish from Michigan State University and a MA and Ph.D., both in Sociology, from the University of Texas at Austin. She received honorary doctorates from The Ohio State University (2002), Lehman College (2003) and Bank Street College (2006).

specializes in the sociology of science, knowledge, and technology. She has spent the past 7 years studying several NASA spacecraft teams as an ethnographer. Her book, Seeing like a Rover: Images and Interaction on the Mars Exploration Rover Mission (Chicago, 2014) draws on over two years of ethnographic immersion with the Mars Exploration Rover mission to show how scientists and engineers use digital images to conduct scientific research on another planet. She is currently working on followup study of the NASA-ESA Cassini mission to Saturn focusing on the role of sociotechnical organization in research, data-sharing, and decision-making on robotic spacecraft teams. Vertesi is also interested in the digital sociology: whether studying computational systems in social life, shifting sociological methods online, or applying sociological insights to build new technologies. She holds a Master's degree from Cambridge and a PhD from Cornell, has received several grants from the National Science Foundation, and was awarded the Hacker-Mullins prize for best graduate student paper from the American Sociological Association, Science, Knowledge and Technology section in 2007.

is Gerhard R. Andlinger `52 Professor of Sociology and Director of Princeton University’s Center for the Study of Religion. He has published widely in the sociology of religion, culture, and civil society. His publications include The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II; After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s; Loose Connections: Joining Together in America’s Fragmented Communities; and Communities of Discourse: Ideology and Social Structure in the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and European Socialism. His recent books include Small-Town America: Finding Community, Shaping the Future and Inventing American Religion: Polls, Surveys, and the Tenuous Quest for a Nation’s Faith. He is an elected member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; a recipient of the Warren J. Mitofsky Award for Excellence in Public Opinion Research, the Mirra Komarovsky Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Martin E. Marty Award for Public Understanding of Religion. His current research focuses on religion and politics, religion and race, social change, rural America, and sociological theory.

is Bert G. Kerstetter ’66 University Professor of Sociology and has a faculty appointment at the Princeton Institute of International and Regional Studies, Princeton University. He is also a Visiting Chair Professor of the Center for Social Research, Peking University. His main areas of interest are social stratification, demography, statistical methods, Chinese studies, and sociology of science. His recently published works include: Marriage and Cohabitation (University of Chicago Press 2007) with Arland Thornton and William Axinn, Statistical Methods for Categorical Data Analysis with Daniel Powers (Emerald 2008, second edition), and Is American Science in Decline? (Harvard University Press, 2012) with Alexandra Killewald. Xie joined the faculty Aug. 1, 2015, after 26 years at the University of Michigan, most recently as the Otis Dudley Duncan Distinguished University Professor of Sociology, Statistics and Public Policy and a research professor in the Population Studies Center at Michigan's Institute for Social Research. Xie's main areas of interest are social stratification, demography, statistical methods, Chinese studies and sociology of science. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Academia Sinica and the National Academy of Sciences. His appointment is part of a University initiative to deepen the regional studies curriculum in the social sciences. The Center on Contemporary China is part of PIIRS, and Xie's appointment marks the first joint faculty appointment by PIIRS and a department in the social sciences.

is Lloyd Cotsen ‘50 Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. She has published books on the development of life insurance, the changing economic and sentimental value of children, and on the place of money in social life. Her book, The Purchase of Intimacy (Princeton University Press, 2005) deals with the interplay of economic activity and personal ties, especially intimate ties, both in everyday practice and in the law. She has also studied topics ranging from economic ethics to consumption practices. She is currently working on a project about “circuits of commerce” which deals with distinctive set of social relations within which people carry on a variety of weighty economic activities. Different from markets, hierarchies, and networks, these economic connections include microcredits, migrant remittances, mutual credit associations, local currencies, coalitions within corporations, and care relations. Her most recent book is Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy (Princeton University Press, 2010).

Research Scholars

is a Research Scholar and Lecturer at Princeton University. She has studied at Ohio State (BA), George Washington (MA), Princeton University (PhD), and Vermont College (MFA). She teaches a Freshman Seminar on the Cold War, and a class called Communism and Beyond: Russia and China. Her publications include Dream of a Red Factory: The Legacy of High Stalinism in China, and Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir, both published by Oxford University Press. She is the guest editor of a special issue on China and the USSR for Modern China Studies called “The Forgotten Decade: A Retrospective Look at the 1950s,” as well as several articles and chapters on the Soviet Advisers Program in China in the 1950s. She is particularly interested in the intersection between the organizational politics of communist parties and international relations among the respective states. She is currently working on a book analyzing the origins and consequences of Khrushchev’s “secret speech,” and its particular impact on China. She was recently named a Behrman Fellow at Princeton.

Emeritus Faculty

is A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, with a joint appointment in the Woodrow Wilson School. He has written widely on organizational analysis, sociology of culture, and social inequality. Among the several books he has written or edited are The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (with Walter Powell); Race, Ethnicity and Participation in the Arts (with Francie Ostrower); and The 21st-Century Firm: Changing Economic Organization in International Perspective. He has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1984-85) and a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1990). He has also served on the Connecticut Commission on the Arts and on the board of the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies. His interests include the sociology of art and culture, social stratification, economic sociology, complex organizations, and the social implications of technology. He is Director of the Center for the Study of Social Organization, active in the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies, and a member of the Executive Committee of the Center for Information Technology and Public Policy. He is involved in research on inequality of access to the new digital technologies, new approaches to identifying patterns in attitude data, and patterns of participation in the arts.

is Professor of Sociology and Faculty Associate of the Office of Population Research. He is director of the National Study of College Experience (NSCE) and Campus Life in America Student Survey (CLASS) projects. His past research has concentrated on social demography, with a particular emphasis on population economics, mathematical demography, family and household demography, and contemporary immigration to the United States. His current research is focused on diversity in higher education; recent articles include "Diversity Outcomes of Test-Optional Policies,” "The Frog Pond Revisited: High School Academic Context, Class Rank, and Elite College Admission," "Self-Efficacy, Stress, and Academic Success in College," and "The Opportunity Cost of Admission Preferences at Elite Universities." His new book from Princeton University Press is No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life. Espenshade received his Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton in 1972. Prior to joining the Princeton faculty in 1988, he held teaching or research positions at the University of California-Berkeley, Bowdoin College, Florida State University, The Urban Institute, and Brown University.

is Howard Harrison and Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of Sociology and director of the Center for Migration and Development at Princeton University. He is the author of 250 articles and chapters on national development, international migration, Latin American and Caribbean urbanization, and economic sociology. He has published 30 books and special issues. His books include City on the Edge – the Transformation of Miami(California 1993), co-authored with Alex Stepick and winner of the Robert Park Award for best book in urban sociology and the Anthony Leeds Award for best book in urban anthropology in 1995; andImmigrant America: A Portrait, 3rd edition, (California 2006), designated as a Centennial Publication by the University of California Press in 1996. His current research is on the adaptation process of the immigrant second generation in comparative perspective, the role of institutions on national development, and immigration and the American health system.

is a Professor of Sociology emeritus. He specializes on Northeast Asian societies: China, Japan, Korea, and Russia. He has compared them, most recently concentrating on national identities. In addition, he works on sociological factors in international relations, emphasizing mutual perceptions and barriers to regionalism. His recent books include: Chinese Strategic Thought toward Asia, U.S. Leadership, History and Bilateral Relations in Northeast Asia, and East Asian National Identities: Commonalities and Differences.

taught at Princeton from 1973 until his retirement several years ago and is now Professor of Sociology Emeritus. His interests include social psychology, small groups, Afro-American studies, sociology of education and research methods. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 1998 Du Bois-Johnson-Fraizer Award from the American Sociology Association and the 2000 President's Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton. He has recently conducted research on African American leadership and elites, to be summarized in the forthcoming book The Black Elite Network in America. He is also at work on a book entitled Race, Class, and The Bell Curve in America.

is Professor of Demographic Studies and Sociology, Emeritus. He earned his Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and is former chair of the Department of Sociology and former Director of the Office of Population Research at Princeton. The author of numerous articles and books, his interests include population policy, comparative fertility in developing countries, fertility surveys, and family planning.